403 Forbidden

Finally, some justice. Decisive. Swift. Effective. The NCAA did the job on Penn State University on Monday, and I suppose the apologists who cried that no rules were broken end up correct that there should be no death penalty for the football program.

No, football wasn't killed.

It got far worse. And deservedly so.

Powerful old Penn State plays on, only now as a hamstrung runt thanks to the courage of the new-era NCAA leadership. The Nittany Lions probably won't beat many other teams for a long while, can't play in a bowl game for four seasons, but will continue to generate revenue toward the NCAA's imposed $60 million penalty fund that will help stop sexual abuse of children.

Joe Paterno's legacy?

Dust.

The current players?

Free to go.

The message?

Morality and decency matter, even in college athletics.

Monday ends up a day for sobriety for all of college athletics. Given all the highly compensated, worldly, powerful people who could have stopped Jerry Sandusky years ago, the true tragedy is that nobody did. We've gone too long with athletics driving the bus, and with a campus drunk on winning, and so, finally, someone talked as if there was a chance we could get all this back under control.

It's true, Penn State didn't commit a single NCAA infraction. No rules violations. Just hollow values, a twisted culture, and awful judgment, and nobody with enough backbone to protect a child at the expense of some embarrassment for a football program that netted $30 million last year behind a "legendary" coach who mostly just served, along with university, as enablers.

Penn State vacates every victory from 1998-2011, and there is sure to be outcry from fans and boosters there who believe the board of trustees rolled over for the NCAA out of fear the program would be killed. Guess what? The program died a long time ago when those in charge wilted at their moment of truth.

"I want to be very clear," NCAA president Mark Emmert said in making the announcement, "there is nothing in this situation for anyone to feel good about."

He's right. Nothing the NCAA could have done on Monday would erase the pain and damage done to a line of children who were victimized by Sandusky, and also, a sick and twisted culture at a university that should have done better. Emmert and Oregon State president Ed Ray, chairman of the NCAA's Executive Committee, spoke as much about those victims as they did Penn State's football program on Monday.

Ray called Penn State's failure a conspiracy of silence, and then, slammed it home with: "This should serve as a stark wake-up call to everyone involved in college sports that our first responsibility is to adhere to the fundamental values of respect, honesty, responsibility."

It's wonderful that college football programs generate loads of revenue. Successful athletic programs have stopped sapping tax resources and bleeding the general fund in a lot of places, and that's not a bad thing. But there's nothing right about throwing away core values, morals and decency in the name of chasing a national championship or a stadium expansion.

There isn't true justice for Sandusky's victims in any of this. Watching Penn State get its brains beat in on Saturdays won't undo the horrific acts they suffered. Knowing that Paterno is no longer college football's winningest coach doesn't unwind time. Seeing Sandusky headed for a life behind bars doesn't fix the past.